Sunday, July 17, 2011

Taos: A Day Off

Yesterday at Taos people finally got a day off. Well, not everybody actually took the day off -- I saw a lot of typing going on at various places around the lodge. But Jack and I went sight-seeing. This lovely carved wolf statue, which I coveted, is in the Millicent Rogers Museum. Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, fell in love with the desert (as do a lot of older women: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe), settled here, collected many Native American artifacts, and left them all in a museum.

We also viewed the Rio Grande Gorge. The gorge itself is impressive and stately, but where I come from, the river at the bottom would barely qualify as a creeklet.

Dinner was at a Bavarian restaurant yet further up the mountain. Much, much further, some of which seemed straight up. The car labored and groaned. But at the top, along with yet more ski chalets and condos, was a lovely German restaurant, all of its beer imported from Munich.

Memorable lines from Friday's critiques:

"You may suffer from extraneous fairies."

"There's nothing like a rat in the first sentence to put us right into a story."